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Topic: TD 2.5.14 all the sudden crashy (Read 1022 times)

Ok. I'm going to start this post saying that, yeah I know TheTD is up to version 3.3. I can't upgrade yet (see below for explanation).

Anyway, all of the sudden during last night's club tournament, TheTD got really crash happy. Any time I moved around on the settings window (e.g. between the controls tab and the game tab), I'd get a crash that looked like the attached screenshot.

Additionally, it would frequently slow down to unusable levels, where just clicking on a check box would take 15 seconds before the click was registered. Or typing a name in a search box took a 30-40 seconds. (I did notice that when things were really slow, the CPU on mshta.exe was pegged.)

This problem wasn't happening in last month's tournament. In between then and now, I made the following changes:

I added a new season for our league

I set our tournament template.tdt to default to the new season

I added a 25-25 round

I modified the events to add the 25-25 round announcement

I modified the layout to undisplay the prizes element

Fortunately, using dropbox for my saves, I can go back to the tournament template.tdt that I was using prior to making the above changes and see if that's the problem. After doing that, I'm still having the same crashy problems with that template.

I'm hopeful that there's something that I can do so that I can continue to use V2. If not, I'm going to have a lot of questions for how to convert to V3... but I'll start that as another thread if it comes to it.

Why I can't upgrade:There are two people in my club who have a license for TheTD. When I purchased a license, I was able to get a free upgrade to the V3 license. My clubmate has to pay for a V3 license upgrade and hasn't. Until he does, his computer is the backup in case my computer dies. So I'm stuck on v2.5.14 until he upgrades his license.

I have not been able to determine a predictable crash scenario, but it happens most often when I change between tabs on settings window. So after I discovered this problem, I was able to get through the tournament by just staying on the controls tab

Autosave was really helpful. Whenever there was a crash, the first thing I'd do is reload the tournament from the Game tab, then turn on autosave, and go to the controls tab. Then restart the tournament from pretty much the last point - althouth wiith maybe a little extra added time

Away from home on business so my reply will have to be brief. I don't want to pass the buck, but I don't think this is a TD issue. The TD runs inside of an environment where it should be impossible to be able to crash. That doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs, nor does it mean you won't encounter a bug in the TD that prevents you from continuing to use the TD without exiting and restarting it (might as well be a crash). But the TD shouldn't be able to crash the "host" environment, which is what you are seeing. In fact, I wouldn't even know how to write something so that this happens.

That said, I think something on your PC likely changed and an unintended consequence is the issue you are seeing with the TD. I can't see how upgrading to v3.0 would fix this, unless whatever the TD is doing that is triggering this has [coincidentally] been changed in 3.0. But it certainly wouldn't have been intentional.

I hate to say it but I don't have a lot of suggestions. You might try upgrading or downgrading Internet Explorer (uninstalling IE will "roll back" to the previous version). Might or might not have any effect. Probably the best thing to try is System Restore, and choosing a restore point at which time the TD was operating normally.

That said, I'm not entirely convinced even though I can't seem to get it to crash any more. First, I had been on IE11 for quite some time. I don't remember how long but several months. And last week was the first time it got so crashy. Also, I tried doing the same things in V3 that would cause a crash in V2 and I couldn't crash V3 while I could (eventually) crash V2.

But as I don't use IE at all (chrome) I'm happy to let this remain an unsolved mystery and keep my IE version as 10.